Does Solr support Soundex? (Soundex was originally developed to
assist with alternate spellings of names)
Keith
On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochk...@jhu.edu> wrote:
> In a Solr-based search, stemming is done at indexing time, into fields with
> stemmed tokens.
>
> It seems typical in library-catalog type applications based on Solr to have
> the default (or even only) searches be over these stemmed fields, thus
> 'auto-stemming' to the user. (Search for 'monkey', find 'monkeys' too, and
> vice versa).
>
> I am curious how many people, who have Solr based catalogs (that is, I'm
> interested in people who have search engines with majority or only content
> originally from MARC), use such stemmed fields ('auto-stemming') over their
> _author_ fields as well.
>
> There are pro's and con's to this. There are certainly some things in an
> author field that would benefit from stemming (mostly various kinds of
> corporate authors, some of whose endings end up looking like english language
> phrases). There are also very many things in an author field that would not
> benefit from stemming, and thus when stemming is done it sometimes(/often?)
> results in false matches, "pluralizing" an author's last name in an
> inappropriate way for instance.
>
> So, wanna say on the list, if you are using a Solr-based catalog, are you
> using stemmed fields for your author searches? Curious what people end up
> doing. If there are any other more complicated clever things you've done
> than just stem-or-not, let us know that too!
>
> Jonathan
>
